Mumbai Fables


Book Description

Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. --







A Joint Enterprise


Book Description

An in-depth look at the urban history of British Bombay.




The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage


Book Description

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.










Astronomy in India, 1784-1876


Book Description

Indian scientific achievements in the early twentieth century are well known, with a number of heralded individuals making globally recognized strides in the field of astrophysics. Covering the period from the foundation of the Asiatick Society in 1784 to the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, Sen explores the relationship between Indian astronomers and the colonial British. He shows that from the mid-nineteenth century, Indians were not passive receivers of European knowledge, but active participants in modern scientific observational astronomy.







Taming the Oriental Bazaar


Book Description

Taming the Oriental Bazaar examines the public market-hall as a key architectural feature of colonial South Asia. Representing a transition in the architectural programme, these buildings were meant to be monuments and markers of modernity in South Asia. The book: Explores how market-halls became an essential feature of colonial settlements from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries Discusses public health policies and legislations central to the concerns of market-hall sanitation Reviews the elements of modernity, including institutions and systems established in the nineteenth century as India went from Company to Crown Studies the specific circumstances and histories of market halls in the towns and cities of Bengaluru, Vadodara, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Karachi, Lahore, Chennai, Pune, and others A key text in the study of colonial architecture, this book will be of interest to students, researchers as well as general readers of architecture, colonialism, history of architecture, history of medicine, public health, urbanism, and South Asian studies.




Bombay Before Mumbai


Book Description

'City of Gold', 'Urbs Prima in Indis', 'Maximum City': no Indian metropolis has captivated the public imagination quite like Mumbai. The past decade has seen an explosion of historical writing on the city that was once Bombay. This book, featuring new essays by its finest historians, presents a rich sample of Bombay's palimpsestic pasts. It considers the making of urban communities and spaces, the workings of power and the nationalist makeover of the colonial city. In addressing these themes, the contributors to this volume engage critically with the scholarship of a distinguished historian of this frenetic metropolis. For over five decades, Jim Masselos has brought to life with skill and empathy Bombay's hidden histories. His books and essays have traversed an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from the actions of the city's elites to the struggles of its most humble denizens. His pioneering research has opened up new perspectives and inspired those who have followed in his wake. Bombay Before Mumbai is a fitting tribute to Masselos' enduring contribution to South Asian urban history




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