The making of the city of capital: histories of slums and films in Colonial Bombay
Abstract
No one narrator can gauge the true shape of an entity as elephantine as the metropolis of Bombay. Sheetal Chhabria and Debashree Mukherjee, however, in their respective accounts of colonial Bombay, masterfully identify the beating heart of this elephant–capital. Their works, though occupied with two distinct narrative arcs of the city’s history, can be discussed alongside each other. They both showcase the power wielded by the capital in urban life and the consequences of such domination on the people who inhabit the city, on their bodies, their livelihoods, their modes of dwelling, and their creative energies. The common grounds for a discussion of these two books also arise from the fact that both are homages to the working-class “humans of Bombay” without whom capital would remain an inert proposition. In so doing, both books engage afresh with the idea of capital and its constitutive role in the economy, society, and culture of the metropolitan life.
