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...
