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Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor
What is the history of caste in a city? Indian modernizers assumed that the various processes of modernity, including industrial capitalism, would attenuate caste and create the possibility of new social relationships, including class solidarity. Instead, capitalism relied on caste to recruit and discipline labor, and the colonial and postcolonial governments deployed it for housing, city planning, and provisions for social welfare.
On its part, caste adapted to housing, urban planning, and even land tenures. Even the purported antitheses of capitalism—Marxism and Communism—could not annihilate caste. As a result, caste became robust even as it was shrouded beneath the veneer of modern urban life.
Outcaste Bombay examines the interplay of caste and class in twentieth-century Bombay. It studies processes that are transnational—capitalism, Marxism, urban planning, literature—and the ways in which they became relevant to life in the city. It focuses on urban outcastes—Dalits primarily, and also the urban poor—to trace their interaction with city-making and urban politics, their sense of self and community, and the cultural life they fashioned in Bombay.
This interdisciplinary book draws on rare English and Marathi-language sources—including novels, poems, and manifestoes—and contributes to debates in the fields of South Asian history, global Marxism, social anthropology, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit studies, and literature.
On its part, caste adapted to housing, urban planning, and even land tenures. Even the purported antitheses of capitalism—Marxism and Communism—could not annihilate caste. As a result, caste became robust even as it was shrouded beneath the veneer of modern urban life.
Outcaste Bombay examines the interplay of caste and class in twentieth-century Bombay. It studies processes that are transnational—capitalism, Marxism, urban planning, literature—and the ways in which they became relevant to life in the city. It focuses on urban outcastes—Dalits primarily, and also the urban poor—to trace their interaction with city-making and urban politics, their sense of self and community, and the cultural life they fashioned in Bombay.
This interdisciplinary book draws on rare English and Marathi-language sources—including novels, poems, and manifestoes—and contributes to debates in the fields of South Asian history, global Marxism, social anthropology, urban studies, labor studies, Dalit studies, and literature.
- GenresIndiaNonfictionHistory
240 pages, Hardcover
Published June 7, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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