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Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor
Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay's population grew twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even as Indians engaged with aspects of modern life, including the Marxist discourse of class, caste distinctions played a pivotal role in determining who was excluded from the city's economic transformations.
Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system, mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order to build a modern Bombay.
Drawing from rare sources written by the urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language—including novels, poems, and manifestos—Outcaste Bombay examines how language and literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through careful scrutiny of one city's complex social fabric, this study illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban planners around the world.
Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system, mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order to build a modern Bombay.
Drawing from rare sources written by the urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language—including novels, poems, and manifestos—Outcaste Bombay examines how language and literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through careful scrutiny of one city's complex social fabric, this study illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban planners around the world.
- GenresIndiaNonfictionHistory
242 pages, Paperback
Published April 25, 2021
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March 15, 2023
This is a book ostensibly about Bombay/Mumbai and its evolution as a physical and intellectual space in the 20th century. But while that is strictly true, Shaikh does so much more in that he joins varied ideological and methodological threads to examine how caste, class, space, state-directed urban planning, and ever-growing capitalist logics which undergird the making of Bombay as a physical and cultural space. Shaikh also breaks with previous limits of the field where Dalits are written on simply as subjects of history, as Shaikh examines Dalit resistance to and navigation of the official CP, the radial cultural sphere and a deeply unequal built environment.
Shaikh expertly tackles labor history, intellectual history, geography, and subaltern studies in one text. This is a highly valuable text for South Asian historians, urbanists or andy students of the 20th century left.
Shaikh expertly tackles labor history, intellectual history, geography, and subaltern studies in one text. This is a highly valuable text for South Asian historians, urbanists or andy students of the 20th century left.
August 1, 2022
How did your book come about? Did you set out to write a history of caste, and why did you choose Bombay as the space to study?
JS: As a journalist in Bombay 20 years ago, I was asked to report on the workers’ protest against the Phoenix Mills. My curiosity led me towards the textile mill strikes in the 1980s, when I realised the protestors were still dealing with the repercussions of their dissolution.
Then, as a masters student in the US, I focused on the importance of caste to the development of the textile mill industry and industrial capitalism in Bombay. Money was raised from kinship networks – that are determined and maintained by caste – to develop industries, and it was just as important for recruiting labour.
Your book begins at the onset of a spatial transformation in Bombay, after the bubonic plague of 1896, where there was a mass departure of people and then a sudden influx of migrants. How did Bombay change?
Cheap labour was the backbone of Bombay’s industrialisation, which necessitated an excess of underpaid and unemployed workers. And because they couldn’t afford rents, 20 of them would settle in a small 10-by-10ft room. Many – especially Dalits – couldn’t even afford that, so they either squatted on land or built shacks made of tin or leaves, called zavli sheds. They still had to pay rent, which was Rs 1-2 per month, compared to the Rs 3-7 per month rent for tenements.
The colonial government then blamed these settlements for the plague, citing congestion and lack of hygiene as reasons. This became a reason to force a change in the landscape. The Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) was advised to clear localities of the urban poor and buy land for rehabilitation. By the 1940s, plans for Greater Bombay came into being, extending the city beyond Mahim, into Salsette Island. By the 1960s, there were plans for New Bombay.
All of this was supposed to relieve the pressure on Bombay, but inevitably, the population grew and so did the slums. The chawls built to replace them were inadequate, and surprisingly, mostly inhabited by the middle or lower middle classes, employed as clerks or police. In the 1950s-60s, some slums were demolished, but some were made permanent. If residents could prove they were populated by people living in them for 15-20 years, they could get land deals, through which they could get legal electricity connections and toilets.
Read the full interview here.
JS: As a journalist in Bombay 20 years ago, I was asked to report on the workers’ protest against the Phoenix Mills. My curiosity led me towards the textile mill strikes in the 1980s, when I realised the protestors were still dealing with the repercussions of their dissolution.
Then, as a masters student in the US, I focused on the importance of caste to the development of the textile mill industry and industrial capitalism in Bombay. Money was raised from kinship networks – that are determined and maintained by caste – to develop industries, and it was just as important for recruiting labour.
Your book begins at the onset of a spatial transformation in Bombay, after the bubonic plague of 1896, where there was a mass departure of people and then a sudden influx of migrants. How did Bombay change?
Cheap labour was the backbone of Bombay’s industrialisation, which necessitated an excess of underpaid and unemployed workers. And because they couldn’t afford rents, 20 of them would settle in a small 10-by-10ft room. Many – especially Dalits – couldn’t even afford that, so they either squatted on land or built shacks made of tin or leaves, called zavli sheds. They still had to pay rent, which was Rs 1-2 per month, compared to the Rs 3-7 per month rent for tenements.
The colonial government then blamed these settlements for the plague, citing congestion and lack of hygiene as reasons. This became a reason to force a change in the landscape. The Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) was advised to clear localities of the urban poor and buy land for rehabilitation. By the 1940s, plans for Greater Bombay came into being, extending the city beyond Mahim, into Salsette Island. By the 1960s, there were plans for New Bombay.
All of this was supposed to relieve the pressure on Bombay, but inevitably, the population grew and so did the slums. The chawls built to replace them were inadequate, and surprisingly, mostly inhabited by the middle or lower middle classes, employed as clerks or police. In the 1950s-60s, some slums were demolished, but some were made permanent. If residents could prove they were populated by people living in them for 15-20 years, they could get land deals, through which they could get legal electricity connections and toilets.
Read the full interview here.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews