This edited volume is an unstinting tribute to Jim Masselos, an Australia-born and University of Bombay–trained historian whose writings are themselves a salutation to the people, streets, and archives of the city of Bombay. In the introduction, coeditor Prashant Kidambi identifies four themes prominent in Masselos's copious body of work: (1) how Indian cities are key sites of reconstituting India's “communities”; (2) how built urban spaces matter and what is revealed by examining the ways in which people inhabit different “spatial templates” in Bombay; (3) how distinct cultures of political power shape and reflect shifting social relations in Bombay; and (4) how anticolonial nationalism shaped Bombay and how Bombay shaped the Indian nationalist struggle. In Bombay before Mumbai, fourteen essays work with these themes to conjure up for the reader a captivating collage of an Indian city during two hundred years of British colonial rule.

Most of the essays focus on the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s, when colonial rule was firmly established, when Bombay was a commercial hub for British and Indian merchant interests, and when the city witnessed the emergence of a modern Indian public sphere, with newspapers, voluntary associations, and political maneuverings.

Two chapters (by Murali Ranganathan and Erica Wald) go further back, to the mid- to late 1700s, when older forms of trading (Karl Polanyi called it “old world trade”Footnote ¹) were clearly juxtaposed with modern/market trade. Here, we are reminded of the variety of trading communities long settled in Bombay (Sonars, Prabhus [Purvoes], Shenvis, Konkani [Kokni] Muslims) and of the many who migrated in (Gujarati Hindus and Muslims, Jains, Parsis, Portuguese, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Iranians), all of whom, along with Europeans, participated in the Bombay Country Trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—a phenomenon that emerged from the ruins of Surat's old business emporium in the 1770s, with its own Bombay Country Ships, trading cotton, opium, tea, silk, sugar and bullion between India, China, and Britain. Europeans participated here, too. This trade (eventually dominated by the Parsis by the 1820s) allowed Indians to “participate in the colonial project, largely on their own terms” (Ranganathan, p. 17). The pre-1850 British imperial project was part warfare, part trade, yet with room, as we see, for an odd whimsy, in the form of theater (Wald). The Bombay Theatre (1770–1843) very often featured European soldiers as actors, and its financing by the British East India Company and private donors was justified by talk of its role in showcasing the “colonial respectability” of the British and their refinement and rationalism compared with the Indian.

An Indian figure that appears repeatedly (center stage in chapters by Jesse S. Palsetia, Simin Patel, Preeti Chopra, and Dinyar Patel) is that of the private benefactor and donor—the wealthy Bombay shetia (urban merchant leaders) who patronized worthy causes and community institutions through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Parsi community is again prominent but not alone (Gujarati and Marathi Hindus, different Muslim shetias as well). Parsi charity focuses at first primarily on the Parsi community, on Parsi fire temples and Parsi hospitals, including public works to benefit all Bombay residents (public wells, disaster relief) but extending easily (Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy is a key figure) to collaborations on large-scale charitable projects and civic institutional building with other social groups and with the British government. We are reminded of the transformation of forms of Indian gift giving into modern charity (involving government oversight, transparency, and an alignment with what is deemed in the general public interest; Chopra, p. 174), and we learn of the surprising readiness of Bombay's cosmopolitan patrons to extend support even to poor Europeans both in the colony (the Sailors’ Home in Bombay, to support European seaman who struggled with alcoholism and venereal disease) and in other countries (“orphans in Singapore, war widows in France and Prussia,” “a drinking fountain at Regent's Park in London”; Patel, pp. 68–69).

While descendants of many shetia families of colonial Bombay have prevailed as the industrialists and propertied elite of contemporary Mumbai, two more fleeting entrepreneurial figures also feature in this edited volume (Ranganathan and Patel). Both happen to be Maharashtrian—the first, M. A. Rogay (a Konkani Muslim), and the second, Shankar Abaji Bhisey (a Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu). In the nineteenth century, Rogay's descendants sold his overseas business fortunes and invested the proceeds in urban property (land, houses). S. A. Bhisey's (1867–1935) is a story of nonstop invention of gadgets to mechanize a changing urban life—including a contraption to indicate the next train station, a nonrefillable store bottle, a weighing machine, a mechanized typewriter, and another kind of typewriter to communicate with spirits. Marketing success eluded Bhisey, unfortunately for him and his family. Bhisey's is also a story of Indian and British financial backers, of Bombay as a site of capital accumulation and entrepreneurial aspirations, and of how, in the early twentieth century, “the worlds of Indian finance and early nationalism were inextricably interconnected” (Patel, p. 241).

By the 1930s, Bombay was at the heart of the movement for Indian independence from British rule. Europeans, as sojourner colonialists, felt a growing sense of embattlement in the city (Douglas E. Haynes), their earlier search for a passably decent, expatriate, colonial lifestyle (Haynes and Abigail McGowan) undercut by increasingly enfranchised Indians reclaiming municipal politics, education, media, commerce, theater, the entire urban landscape. Whereas earlier Bombay shetias expressed broad support for the British, cooperating and enabling their imperial vision and enjoying mutual commercial interests, the rise of the Indian National Congress (INC) and its activities in Bombay generated new alignments and new fault lines (chapters by Vanessa Caru, Robert Rahman Raman, and Danish Khan). Prohibition and liquor shop picketing appear in two chapters on the INC in Bombay. In the early 1930s, we read of how the INC failed to prevent the “communalizing” of such picketing (Raman, p. 278), with Muslim mill worker volunteers picketing liquor shops whereas Hindu volunteers picketed foreign cloth stores. Yet by the mid-1930s, with the INC choosing to finance their prohibition movement in rural India by higher urban property taxes, both Muslim and other landlords, increasingly mobilized against prohibition.

The working populations of Bombay, including mill workers and sex workers (chapter by Ashwini Tambe), inspired the machinations of political leaders and government officials. First, the 1898 plague and then British cloth mill owners drew attention to unsanitary living conditions of workers in Bombay. Frustrated by the lower production costs of cotton cloth in Bombay, British mill owners held Bombay mill owners responsible for building decent housing for their workers (Caru). While the colonial government eventually built many more worker tenements in Bombay than private Indian capitalists, such housing came to be viewed with suspicion by working-class leaders, as enforcing compliance/submission. Sufi teachings (by the saint Habib ‘Ali) were also adapted in the city to tame working-class crowds (these focused on Muslim mill and dock workers), with manuals created to depict appropriate behavior during riotously popular street festivals (Nile Green).

Bombay before Mumbai is a collection of histories of the social groups, commercial enterprises, and indigenous cosmopolitan aspirations that built this city. It outlines the city's fault lines of class, race, and religion. It brings to light its many creative energies. A teacher is sure to find individual essays in here to immerse their students in Bombay's colonial past. In a final chapter, Jim Masselos walks the reader through a timeline of his own love affair with Bombay, beginning with his landing at Bombay Airport in 1961 to begin his doctoral training at St. Xavier's College. His story will resonate with the reader's experience of this book, a thoughtful and insightful foray through distinct spaces and places of Bombay, a heartfelt encounter with the city's assortment and fusion of peoples and trades.