Towards the end of his book, Prashant Kidambi ruefully observes that the crises that have racked Bombay in recent years have produced nostalgic invocations of a lost Golden Age. They ‘have prompted long-standing residents of Bombay to lament the passing of what once supposedly made it a dynamic, innovative and cosmopolitan metropolis . . . with the state and citizenry discharging their mutual responsibilities and obligations in a decorous manner’ (pp. 235–6). Kidambi's work, a careful and persuasive reconstruction of the tensions that actually underpinned Bombay's growth as India's major centre of industrial capitalism, effectively punctures these myths. The formation of an ‘unintended city’ (a phrase that crops up numerous times in the book) constitutes his conceptual point of departure. Bombay, from the late nineteenth century, came to be a city of immigrants who poured into both the expanding cotton-mill industry and the casual, ‘secondary’ economies of the street and bazaar. Those who inhabited this unstable industrial world came to constitute a problem for colonial authorities and civic bodies, for a range of reasons: their demographic weight, their ‘unruly’ politics and the ‘insanitary’ built environment they inhabited.

Kidambi's major accomplishment is to identify the years between 1890 and 1920 as an important historical conjuncture, where the seeds of many of the processes we typically associate with ‘modern’ Bombay were sown. This identification allows Kidambi to make several key thematic departures. First, he places much-needed emphasis on the transformation of Bombay's built environment, mainly as a consequence of the plague pandemic that struck the city at the end of the nineteenth century. The state's medical policing of the bodies of the city's urban poor, Kidambi demonstrates, was accompanied and even conceptually preceded by its assault upon the neighbourhoods where they lived. ‘Localist’ comprehensions of the epidemic, which explained its spread in terms of ‘predisposing’ conditions of urban squalor and filth, exercised a crucial influence upon plague regulation. The Bombay Improvement Trust, set up in 1898, which Kidambi considers at length, was a concrete institutional expression of these concerns with the built environment. The Trust was set up to shepherd Bombay through an ambitious programme of urban renewal: the construction of thoroughfares, the sanitary housing of the poor, slum clearance and the development of vacant land. As Kidambi shows, the project of reordering the city ran up against insuperable obstacles: the imperatives of cost-effectiveness, the legal and bureaucratic entanglements of the Trust and resistance from a wide range of social groups, both propertied and labouring.

Kidambi's concern with the politics of the built environment is supplemented by a close analysis of the policing of public order in Bombay in the 1890s and 1900s. The communal riot of 1893, the plague riot of 1898, the annual Muharram commemorations and the persistent ‘casual economies of the street’ (hawking, begging, gambling, prostitution and so on) came to be regulated more thoroughly by an expanding police force. Kidambi traces the rise of a new police interventionism where, earlier, neighbourhoods of the urban poor had been left largely unregulated. Such regulatory drives, he is careful to point out, were neither unambiguously successful nor unsuccessful: the scale of urban policing rose, but so too did the scale of conflict between the urban poor and the police.

The concluding chapters of the book, however, explore another unfolding dynamic: the growth of a rich, hybrid, but also deeply segmented domain of associational activity in Bombay. Kidambi demonstrates how associational activity in late colonial Bombay crossed the boundaries of religious and secular domains, elective and ascriptive affinities and egalitarian and hierarchical protocols of functioning. ‘Civil society’ emerges as a polyphonic entity in Kidambi's account, where the languages of rational individuality and community organization jostle. This is an account of civil society that engrosses caste associations, clerical unions, libraries, nationalist groups, commercial bodies, cow-protection societies and cricket clubs. If neat categorical divisions between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society were to be deployed, such an assemblage of associations would simply appear incoherent. Kidambi's recovery of a public space where such an assemblage could exist, and constitute a ‘civil society’ in its own right, confounds such neat binaries. Kidambi's last chapter considers the growth of an ethic of ‘social service’ that underpinned civic activism amongst Bombay's Anglophone intelligentsia. The ‘uplift’ of the ‘depressed’ classes in urban society took a range of forms: temperance movements, education for ‘untouchable’ children, anti-prostitution campaigning and sanitary activism. Such initiatives were, on the surface, middle-class attempts to construct non-antagonistic relationships with the urban poor. Simultaneously, however, they were also ‘discourses of empowerment’: in other words, an ethic of active social service provided a ground for the fashioning of middle-class identity.

A slightly puzzling omission in the book is the absence of any consideration of working-class politics on its own terms. The 1890s, after all, saw an unprecedented intensity of working-class riots and strikes, which, as Kidambi acknowledges, founded the politics of urban order. This omission is all the more puzzling since the doctoral dissertation the book flowed from (which this reviewer happily chanced upon in the British Library) contains the best account we have had yet of working-class politics in this period, since Chandavarkar's magisterial survey largely relegates pre-World War I labour history to a backdrop for the more turbulent decades to come. Kidambi's published work sensitively examines the spectral form urban unrest assumed for the state and city elites, and the ways in which the urban poor's actions provided the key site for a range of experiments in social control. Appending a fuller consideration of the politics of the poor on their own terms would have completed the circle, and perhaps given us a more fully dialectical appreciation of the evolving relationship between state, elite groups and working classes. Despite this omission, however, The Making of an Indian Metropolis is a major, potentially ground-breaking, contribution to historical scholarship on Bombay, and more generally on India's urban modernity.