It would be fair to say that the late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, now ranked among India's finest ever social historians, was never a great fan of the field of urban history. In one of several penetrating essays in this strikingly coherent posthumous collection, he rails against the conceptual chaos that has engulfed the discipline and against those historians who ‘have often gone shopping in the supermarkets of the social sciences emptying the shelves indiscriminately before weighing the cost in conceptual confusion and theoretical bankruptcy’. There are few fields, he tells us, that have ‘displayed less clarity about the underlying purpose and problematic of research’ or been ‘as shrouded in the thickets of concepts capable of consuming the novice and wasting the initiated’ (pp. 206–07). Having got up to speed, he then demolishes his main bugbear: the underlying attempt of urban historians to understand the city as a generic entity. Chandavarkar would rather we considered the city as a ‘relational category constituted by and dependent upon its wider political economy’ (pp. 218–19). In the remainder of this essay, and, indeed, throughout much of this book, he endeavours to show us how.

Almost invariably, the city in question is Chandavarkar's own hometown of Mumbai and the view we get of it, as befits a historian known for his studies of Indian labour, is from below. This is quite literally the case during his lengthy excursus into the city's colonial drains and sewers, features which he observes the fashion for urban history in the 1970s somehow missed as it came and went. In what appears to be a groundbreaking account, he reveals how Mumbai's perennial sanitation problems shaped the social relations of its inhabitants and set limits on its urbanization. Ultimately, the history of Mumbai excrement, along with the continued failure of colonial policy to deal with it, emerges as an insightful way to assess how ‘ruling attitudes towards labour received their practical manifestation’ – how in practice the city's haves treated its have-nots (p. 33).

Elsewhere, Chandavarkar's view of the city as first and foremost constituted by wider political and social forces (and only then by the forces it may have generated by itself as a discrete historical agent) comes to the fore. In an essay on ‘peasants and proletarians’ he expands and refines arguments put forward in his earlier work to explore further the vitality of Mumbai's urban–rural nexus. From the late nineteenth century on, he argues, Mumbai became a place of sojourn for a migratory labour force that while dependent on the city remained rooted in the village. For the city's rural migrants, village connections and loosely defined kinship ties emerged as fundamental to working-class survival. Far from inhibiting working-class unity, these rural ties (along with those of caste) ‘injected solidarities’ into the labour movement. In Chandavarkar's view, historians who have been overly influenced by the notion of a strong urban–rural divide, who have argued that labour unrest in the Indian city was merely the response of a rural workforce to the challenges posed by an urban and industrial setting, and who have sometimes claimed that the imported rural mentalities of Indian workers retarded their proletarian evolution have missed the essential point. ‘Political consciousness and political action were rooted in an experience which integrated both town and country’ (p. 82).

Other essays in this collection reveal the new directions in which Chandavarkar's research was moving at the time of his untimely death. Readers already familiar with his work will be aware of the importance he attached to the neighbourhood (more so than the workplace) as the key arena crucial to understanding the lives of India's urban poor. In the one previously published essay in this collection, he returns to this arena now armed with a significant new research tool. This turns out to be a collection of one hundred oral histories of former millworkers from Mumbai's Girangaon district, compiled and published through the efforts of the Indian architect Neera Adarkar and journalist Meena Menon. Using these materials, Chandavarkar crafts a vibrant account of the twentieth-century rise and fall of the communists in Girangaon, and of the eventual decline of the city's labour movement. Such a decline, he concludes, resulted in deterioration of workers’ rights after Indian independence rather than their improvement.

In arguing thus, Chandavarkar explains why the secular, cross-communal political culture that the labour movement had nurtured in Mumbai's working-class neighbourhoods also failed to survive into the postcolonial era, instead giving way to an increasingly militant sectarianism. The question of where the city's cosmopolitan ethos went likewise animates his only discussion of Mumbai elites in this volume. Given that several historians have now turned to studying the development of similar cosmopolitan ethos in other colonial cities, it is a great shame that we were never able to hear more from Chandavarkar on this subject. Would he have gone on to explain where the eclectic political culture shared by both Mumbai's rich and poor intersected, and with what political results? Given time to consider new research in this area, might he have even softened his attitude towards those scholars still willing to pursue the city as a generic entity – as, indeed, a discrete space that fostered a cosmopolitan world-view more likely to be found in similar urban centres than in the hinterland?

Overall, this is an important, provocative and highly impressive collection. It appears even more impressive when we consider that it consists almost entirely of unpublished, semi-published and unfinished papers left by Chandavarkar at the time of his death. Their inevitable rawness in places, the lack of references and occasional repetitions, are more than compensated for by the sheer force of the arguments. The editors responsible for this collection, Jennifer Davis and David Washbrook, should be especially commended for their excellent chapters which bookend this volume, which discuss the overlap between Chandavarkar's life and research interests and the place of his work within the broader field of global labour history. History, Culture and the Indian City will certainly challenge historians of the Asian city. But it will also hopefully inspire them through what is a fitting testament to a virtuoso mind.