Abstract
There is a sense in which urbanization recapitulates civilization. More than seventy per cent of Bombay's people came from outside the city, most of them probably from rural villages. When they arrived, they found their old affiliations and loyalties supplemented, sometimes challenged, by new ones. The important village affiliations—it would be misleading to call them memberships or associations—were made at birth and sanctioned by ritual and long usage. Urban affiliations, including the vital ones of job, union, and “brotherhood” (for men without families sharing the same tenement room), are made by choice and derive their rightness not from faith but from their serviceability to the city dweller. Traditionally, it has been the intrinsic problem as well as the opportunity of cities to bring hitherto isolated tribes, religions, and trades into interaction. Both V. Gordon Childe and Ralph Turner declare that the resolution of this problem yields civilization. In a limited sense, it is always being solved in big cities: one can study it in caste interplay in the managing agencies of the Bombay textile industry, in the system of the Catholic church, or in the precinct organization of Boston. In this study, I will call this aspect of urbanization the competition of loyalties.