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 address their dire housing needs, the city's administration responded with various technocratic solutions (ranging from slum clearance to slum rehabilitation to slum improvement) to manage the strident “politics of the poor,” only creating more slums in the process.

Taking us through the history of these movements and analyses provided by Dalit activists, Shaikh illuminates the relationship between caste and class, the dialogue between Dalit politics and the working-class movement in the city, and their conflicts and convergences: the use of conceptual tools from Marxist thought by Dalit artists and activists to encapsulate Dalit life in the city (e.g., commodification of bodies and relationships in slums), but also the haunting of class by caste in upper-caste translations and working-class receptions of Marxist thought in Marathi. For example, while abstract categories such as “use-value” (upyakta vastu), “exchange-value” (vikriya mola), and “mode of production” (utpadhanpaddhati) were translated in the Marathi Communist Manifesto into Sanskritized words (p. 50), embodied categories such as “lumpen proletariat” (mavali) were translated using caste-inflected urban slang words: mavali was used in colonial registers to denote people from the hilly regions of the Bombay Presidency associated with law and order problems (p. 69).

Shaikh's book encapsulates well the complexity of the Dalit encounter with modernity—its radical possibilities of equality and its intensification of caste subordination. This, Shaikh describes, was a period understood by contemporaries in revolutionary terms. While city planners aimed to revolutionize the modern city by devising a spatial fix to the city's sanitation and overcrowding problems, Dalit activists and artists sought to “obliterate [the] contradictions and hasten the promise of modernity—understood here as razing the structures that inhibited social equality” (p. 123). This revolutionary dream—birthing a new social order and, through it, a new Dalit self—was made possible by a global revolutionary conjuncture (inspired particularly by the French, Russian, Chinese, and African American revolutions). Outcaste Bombay brings to life the extraordinary cast of Dalit activists and artists who envisioned this dream and fought for it through a variety of forms (loknatya, jalsa, tamasha, sahitya, Little Magazines) and movements (Dalit Panthers, Dalit Sahitya, Nava Kavya, Sathottari).

Bombay Brokers, edited by Lisa Björkman, picks up where Outcaste Bombay leaves off, introducing us to a starkly different Bombay of the 1980s and onward—a “city of deals” or dhanda (p. 270). Thirty-six ethnographic profiles of individual “brokers” cluster around the principal questions animating this book: “What is the broker brokering? What is the fixer fixing? Whence the gaps that need bridging?” (p. 33). The gaps or contradictions that become illuminated in the course of these essays are produced by the deindustrialization and increasingly unfettered absorption of modern Mumbai's urban life into the flows and tempos of global finance capital. As the political economy of Bombay city changed after the mill closures of the 1980s, new actors became important on the urbanscape—international and local NGOS, the World Bank, real estate investors, contractors, community-based organizations, advanced locality managements, resident welfare associations, and so on. Politically, this climate emboldened the growing right-wing nativist movement in the Shiv Sena, which violently decimated or absorbed an important section of the city's working-class Communist and Dalit leadership, promised support and employment to Marathi Manoos, and demanded the expulsion of North Indian migrants denounced as bhaiyyas from the city.

Life in this transitional milieu of “Maharashtra for Maharashtrians,” city beautification by slum demolition, and “development” by market forces was/is lived by bridging many contradictions and mediating many conflicts: slum dwellers who can show documented evidence of having inhabited their tenements since before the 1980s can be rehabilitated after slum demolitions, but their neighbors without papers cannot; property developers may buy demolished slum property at negligible rates if they promise to build low-cost housing alongside for-profit high-rises, but slum dwellers themselves may not purchase the same land, even at a higher price; the city's poor taking money in return for unofficial brokering services is called corruption (dalali), but offering favors and using middle-class or upper-caste connections to expedite public services (such as pothole repairs) is called social service (karyakarta); some Dalit anticaste artists sing of freedom and dignity, but insist that Dalit women must remain proscribed to the role of performing morality.

The brokers and mediators of these and many other contradictions and conflicts are the dramatis personae of this account of life in modern Mumbai. Björkman's introduction and six further introductions preceding the thematic clusters (“development,” “property,” “business,” “difference,” “publics,” “truth”) call the reader's attention to the moralizing discourses surrounding these brokering activities (“corruption” and “social service”), the expertise these characters claim and embody, the forms of value they produce, and the different currencies in which such value is traded. In so doing, they argue for an image of the city that is less the sum of discrete, independently functioning parts (such as the state and society, the public and the private, the licit and the illicit) and more a concatenation of forms that are always overflowing their institutionalized frames (these overflows being the realm of mediation or brokering).

The real strength of this book lies in its individual profiles, the sheer diversity of which take the reader through the different sounds and neighborhoods of Mumbai and Greater Mumbai and as far as China, Dubai, America, and Brazil, reproducing the many scales and processes—local and translocal—through which the city is produced as a place (or many places). The brief ethnographies work almost like a multivocal novel, introducing the reader to some brilliant, some curious characters. Methodologically, this dispersed mode of investigating the functioning of a globalizing city by means of the discourses and practices of mediation offers a rich model for the study of contemporary urbanisms. The combination of theory and ethnography is concluded by a fitting historical reflection by Lisa Mitchell on the role played by dubashes in nineteenth-century Madras—a different city in a different time—to reinforce the argument that “particular types of brokerage work often emerge at times of transition” (p. 415). The book, she argues thus, is not simply about Bombay but about the significance of brokerage work for the study of societies at large.

Bombay Brokers is an expert exploration of how life is fashioned in a harshly hierarchical city through the activities of individuals—creative, complex, tenacious individuals who accomplish survival, success or profit, sometimes space to build a community, by brokering deals and mediating conflicts between messy, overflowing institutions. In contrast, the protagonists of Outcaste Bombay are part of (or seeking to be part of) organized collectives or movements that seek to transform the fundamentals of living by a symbolic and substantive politics of change. Reading these two books together, it appears that whereas a revolutionary politics of trade unions, Dalit Panthers, Ambedkarites, and Dalit literary organizations challenged class and caste supremacy in the colonial and postcolonial state and society in the century preceding 1984, an ethos of self-help, social service, and risk-taking innovation remains the best hope for individual and collective progress after economic liberalization. While there is certainly much truth in this appearance—the revolutionary moment of the mid- to late nineteenth century has passed—it also obscures something about Mumbai's present cultures of protest. Barring Shailaja Paik's thought-provoking profile of Bhimsen Gaikwad, (“singer of justice” in the Ambedkari tradition) and R. Swaminathan's profile of Laxmi (“dealer in emotions” who lives by monetizing the shame her transgendered body provokes while also acting collectively to challenge it), the framing of Bombay Brokers centers a politics of exchange (dhanda) over that of change (vidroh). One is left wondering whether the city has quite so completely left behind its dreams of “razing the structures that inhibit social equality” (p. 123).

The profiles covered in the book themselves suggest otherwise. Paik speaks of a new generation of politically assertive Dalit women (one is reminded of Sheetal Sathe and others of the Kabir Kala Manch), and the insightful Laxmi sums up the contradictions of the city best:

But also,

If she had a magic wand, Laxmi says she would wish that people would not flinch when she touched them. “We are humans too” (p. 276). How can liberalized, globalized Mumbai broker that?