The “rise and proliferation of apartment living,” argues Nikhil Rao, “is the distinctive feature of the growth of Bombay from about 1918 to 1960” (p. 2). Analyzing the introduction of “suburban” living and apartment dwelling in Bombay, he chronicles the dynamic relations of governmental initiatives for urban development with the (literally) “on the ground” realities of complex land tenures, property speculators, concepts of town-planning, and the sociocultural ambitions of an emerging “upper-caste lower middle class” (p. 2). While the work addresses the whole of the Bombay city and island, as it was until the 1950s, Rao focuses on a particular suburb—Matunga. This suburb—an early twentieth-century project of the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT)—came to be associated with a recently migrated population of South Indian upper-caste families whose economic condition depended largely on white-collar “clerical” office work. While, in a sense, the thrust of most of the book is “how did Matunga come to be?,” the exposition of the circumstances surrounding that process provides a broad historical analysis of changing relations of society and space in Bombay from the 1910s to the 1960s.
The “suburbanization” of Bombay was born in 1896 in the heart of the densely populated old town with an outbreak of bubonic plague that sporadically disrupted the city's life and economy for the following decade. Faced with an impending European embargo on Bombay shipping, it was necessary that the colonial government be seen to be doing something. Apart from emergency health measures, a new BIT, modeled on a similar agency in Glasgow, was launched in 1898 to carry out a program of slum clearances and erection of sanitary housing, driving new roads through congested neighborhoods and opening up new areas for improved housing in still relatively empty lands in the northeast of the island—the area of Dadar-Matunga.
The initial view that this new suburb would house working-class families was soon abandoned, as it was clear the laborers’ long hours and low wages could not permit lengthy home-to-work journeys. The city's well-to-do having already gravitated to the salubrious Malabar and Cumballa Hills on the west, the BIT turned to creating of a zone for middle-class residence. While acquisition of open lands enabled the Trust to avoid some entanglements of complex land tenures and local property speculators, one outcome that continues to haunt modern Mumbai was the emergence of land as a commodity in a geographically constricted landscape. The book, in the author's words, “recenters the history of Bombay's urban growth around the political economy of land” (p. 20).
Rao introduces the beneficiaries of the project in a nuanced identity: the “upper-caste lower middle class” (p. 2)—a clerical class responding to opportunities in the burgeoning public and private administrative offices in the city. The BIT's expectation that the new opportunities would be readily accepted proved to be frustrated, as economics and existing affective ties inhibited established middle-class families from contemplating a shift to a distant suburb. More recently arrived immigrants lacking existing local connections proved to be more amenable to “suburban living.” In the case of Matunga, the newcomers were upper-caste South Indians.
The buildings that arose in Matunga were low-rise apartments—a compromise between a garden suburb of cottages and the economic realities of land values. Rao demonstrates that the cumulative impact of the technological development of reinforced cement concrete, the growth of a new generation of indigenous architects, and the open fields of the BIT contributed to the innovation of apartment living. He states that the “self-contained nature of the Bombay flat [was] central to its social meaning” becoming intimately connected to notions of middle-class identity (p. 102). A toilet of one's own represented a radical change in Bombay urban life.
Shifting from architecture and urban planning to the actual business of life in Matunga, Rao sketches an ethnography of a South Indian upper-caste identity culturally reinforced by schools, shops, temples, and Sunday morning cinema shows for Tamil and Malayalam films. He acknowledges that a different story emerged west of the railway line in Dharavi, where lower-status Tamil migrants, many of whom had constructed Matunga's new apartments and shops, lived in the early incarnation of what came to be called the largest slum in Asia. No BIT project arose to offer apartment living in this parallel South Indian universe.
The book concludes with a chapter about the new annexations in 1950 of “Greater Bombay”—the island of Salsette. This new territory has become home to thousands of apartments, but the narrative is limited mostly to administrative process. A future monograph would be welcome.
House, but No Garden illuminates important elements in the development of housing, society, and culture of today's Mumbai. The intersections of urban planning, architecture, migration, and acculturation offer valuable insights to any reader interested in the evolution of modern urban South Asia.
