The relationship between empires and cities has achieved the status of a distinct strand within the ever-widening field of urban studies. This monograph explores colonial strategies of urban governance and responses to them in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bombay. The author argues that the defining features of municipal Bombay and the public culture surrounding them emerged during this period.

The narrative traces how the rapid growth of Bombay as an industrial center of Western India in the late nineteenth century meant the rise of unplanned spaces peopled with slum dwellers whose quality of life was a matter of indifference to the colonial rulers. During the 1890s Bombay was engulfed by crises that forced the colonizers to develop techniques of urban control. The high rate of mortality among the poor inhabitants of the city during the plague epidemic in the late 1890s meant the colonial containment strategies to fight the disease would become indistinguishable from a larger and deliberate class offensive to establish control over the working-class neighborhoods and to segregate the upper classes from the lower orders. Victorian slum and urban-management models were simultaneously institutionalized in the form of the City of Bombay Improvement Trust in 1898. The trust attempted to alter the urban physiognomy of the city through demolition drives targeting populous and derelict areas. These efforts generated conflict and contestations among different class segments, and it was the propertied Indians who were most successful in resisting what they regarded as intrusive urban planning. Colonial attempts to create new mechanisms of control through restructuring of the urban spaces were accompanied by the need to physically regulate them. Growth of casual wage labor, communal identities, and violent social conflicts meant colonial and proprietorial concerns over law and order would translate into expansion of policing functions. A new police act in 1902 expressed the shift from indirect to direct forms of state authoritarianism.

Indian class segments, meanwhile, attempted to consolidate and advance their interests through various collectives based on diverse affiliations of caste, class, religion, and nation, which emerged in the city from the late nineteenth century onward. Their appearance marked the shaping of a colonized civil society in Bombay. A multistranded public culture flourished with the proliferation of associations and societies. While proprietor segments, particularly the different sections of the Western-educated intelligentsia, played a leading role in the formation of these collectives, the working classes also displayed a keen interest in combining to secure ideals of improvement and self-help to ward off the effects of social marginalization. As notions of civic activism through group efforts gained popularity, models of “public leadership” emerged. Public activism fashioned the drive of urban upper and middle classes to weave dual hegemony. Influence was sought over their own ranks through the politics of self-reform and over those below them through the politics of “social service.” These initiatives preceded and contributed to the nationalist handling of issues related to poverty and class under Gandhian leadership.

While focusing on the transformation of Bombay from a major colonial port city to an industrial cosmopolis, however, the monograph neglects the continued relevance of the dock facilities to colonial capital and imperial armed dominance over racialized subjects. The role of sailors and dockworkers, alongside factory workers, contributed increasingly to colonial and Indian proprietorial anxieties over control of the city. Their organized militancy became impossible to ignore during the last days of British rule, culminating in a brief but massive working-class anti-imperialist radical upsurge that was brutally suppressed by the colonial authorities during the naval strike in February 1946.

The otherwise exhaustive and excellent bibliography fails to include pioneering research offering social interpretations of colonial urban politics by Rajat Ray (Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875–1939 [New Delhi: Vikas, 1979]) and Georges Kristoffel Lieten (Colonialism Class and Nation: The Confrontation in Bombay around 1930 [Calcutta: Bagchi, 1984]). Vernacular sources on urban culture and history are nearly missing from the laboriously compiled primary and secondary references. Occasional deployment of terms such as the “Great War” reflects a tendency to conform to conventional British history writing.

Despite these occlusions, this is a very finely researched, sophisticated, rigorous, and lucid account. The originality of the monograph is rooted in the richness of archival data, mined chiefly from colonial records, which form the body of an absorbing and elegant narrative. This is essential reading for all those who are interested in the biographies of cities and is a valuable addition to the existing literature on a complex and fascinating third-world metropolis.