This posthumously published collection of nine brilliant essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar underline the loss of so able a social historian. Edited by a team of his friends—Jennifer Davis (who wrote the introduction), Gordon Johnson, and David Washbrook (who wrote the postscript)—this thoughtful volume serves not only to remind us what a pioneer in the field of labor history Chandavarkar was, but how greatly he will be missed as a fellow scholar. His short career as a Reader in the History and Politics of South Asia, Fellow at Trinity College, and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge was nonetheless stellar. His path-breaking study of Bombay mill workers, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), went on to become an instant classic, challenging previous understandings of labor history and formulations of class in urban India. Chandavarkar's rewriting of labor history included a pointed political critique of how the writing of history was viewed as a whole; he argued that treating the West as a norm and India as an exception was a form of academic orientalism. Rules, he suggested, that required such “gigantic exceptions to sustain themselves” needed re-examination (Chandavarkar 1994, p. 1). He firmly believed that history should be rewritten from the margins, by people interested in the material and social worlds, and not in ideology alone. He explored the implications of his argument and method in the sphere of Indian politics in his monograph Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Chandavarkar's scholarly rejection of the fashionable tropes within academic circles led to a persuasive re-framing of the perceived dichotomies between agriculture and industry, rural and urban areas, workplace and neighborhood, as he sought to capture the authentic South Asian experience. He embedded his work in the everyday lives of urban Indians, teasing out a fine-grained yet grand analysis of the social and political conditions in the subcontinent.

This current collection is animated by the same broader concerns and bears his unique and nuanced imprint. The essays showcase his understanding of social forces that make and unmake class and experience within a particular historical context through interactions with the colonial and post-colonial state, strategies of capital, and the organization of spaces—physical, semiotic, and spatial—within the urban context. For example, the deceptively simple essay “Sewers” (pp. 31–59) uses the history of the drainage system of Bombay to interrogate the colonial understanding of “a hygienic environment” and the political context of “improvement” to produce a “deliberate geographical and social restructuring of the city” (p. 59) through which ruling attitudes towards labor could receive “a practical manifestation” (p. 33) of governance. But his inquisitive eye does not stop with the city, but questions the nature of Indian society as a whole. The chapter on “Religion and Nationalism in India” (pp. 103–121), which I thought to be an incisive overview of the understanding of religious fracture in India, argues that the unique understanding of “communalism” in the subcontinent “should be understood in terms of the racialization of social, especially religious, difference. It cannot be grasped as religious conflict in isolation from caste and class, language and ‘ethnicity’” (p. 111, emphasis mine). The fact that this statement seems almost a taken-for-granted challenge to Indian sociology owes a great deal to the influence of Chandavarkar's pioneering work. His creative re-thinking of universalizing theories such as modernity and tradition make his thought-provokingly short essay “Urban History and Urban Anthropology in South Asia” (pp. 206–236) mandatory reading. In this cogently argued and skillfully written essay (which I thoroughly enjoyed), he gently suggests that the legacy of 1960s anthropology is “to interrogate social theory from its own perspective, partly by opening up some of its assumptions and categories to empirical research” (p. 231), something that few social theorists have been brave enough to attempt. He makes the case that using concepts like “city” or “state” excessively formally tends to flatten out “the negotiable character of the social relationships out of which they were fashioned, as well as the reciprocities which they entailed” (p. 221) and the hardening of these categories has allowed for worn-out lines of argument where the modus operandi has been to investigate the Indian character in terms of general social processes subsequently identifying and explaining the difference, rather than looking for culturally specific explanations. This is an ethnocentric exercise, that, according to Chandavarkar, has led to “marginaliz(ation) of Indian studies as a specialism within the broader field of knowledge” (p. 213).

All the essays in the volume are alive with Chandavarkar's voice; his gentle intellectual power and soft revolutionary influence. They issue a timely challenge to South-Asianists of all stripes as well as a new generation of scholars to think across ossifying disciplinary boundaries and thought-clogging accepted intellectual discourses to reanimate the study of South Asian society.