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  26. Ibid., 59.

  27. Ibid., 60.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Cited in Edwardes, Gazetteer of Bombay City 1:66.

  30. Ibid. 2:170.

  31. Ibid. 1:68–69; 2:170.

  32. Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Eminence Designs Private Ltd., 2001), 92.

  33. Christopher W. London, Bombay Gothic (Mumbai: India Book House Publishing Limited, 2002), 28.

  34. For a full description of these Gothic buildings and their history, see ibid.

  35. Ibid., 90–92.

  36. See David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981).

  37. G. W. Stevens, “All India in Miniature,” in The Charm of Bombay: An Anthology of Writing in Praise of the First City in India, ed. R. P. Karkaria (Bombay: D. B. Tarporevala & Sons, 1915), 82.

  38. Govind Narayan Madgavkar, Mumbaichi Varnan (1863); translated as Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863, trans. Murali Ranganathan (London: Anthem Press, 2007).

  39. Ibid., 32–33.

  40. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 9–106; The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis; and Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  41. D. E. Wacha, Shells from the Sands of Bombay (Bombay: Bombay Chronicle Press, 1920).

  42. D. E. Wacha, Rise and Growth of Bombay Municipal Government (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1913).

  43. Wacha, Shells from the Sands of Bombay, 558.

  44. Ibid., 560–61.

  45. Ibid., 566–67.

  46. Ibid., 461–84.

  47. Ibid., 318.

  48. Ibid., 319.

  49. What follows is based on Wacha, Shells from the Sands of Bombay, 82–93.

  50. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 21.

  51. Madgavkar, Mumbaichi Varnan, 7.

  52. Ibid., 12.

  53. Hari Narayan Apte, Pan Lakshyat Kon Gheto! cited in Meera Kosambi’s “Marathi Writers,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 264.

  54. Madgavkar, Mumbaichi Varnan, 29.

  55. Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” 44. See also Gleber, Art of Taking a Walk, 57; and David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 52–56.

  56. Naoroji M. Dumasia, A Biographical Sketch of Sardar Mir Abdul Ali, Khan Bahadur, Head of the Detective Police, Bombay (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Press, 1896).

  57. Ibid., pt. 2, p. 1.

  58. Dumasia, “The Lady and the Marwaree,” ibid., pt. 1, pp. 126–30.

  59. Dumasia, “Double Murder at Oomerkhadi,” ibid., pt. 1, pp. 188–95.

  60. Stevens, Charm of Bombay, 82–83.

  61. S. M. Edwardes, By-Ways of Bombay (Bombay: Times of India Office, 1912), 6–7.

  62. Ibid., 9.

  63. Ibid., 11.

  64. Ibid., 16.

  65. Ibid., 48–51.

  66. Ibid., 91–95.

  67. Cited in Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Cities Within, 209.

  68. See, for example, A. R. Burnett-Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay: A Study in Economic Conditions of the Wage-Earning Classes in Bombay (London: P. S. King, 1925).

  69. See Robert Alter’s perceptive reading of Dickens on this point in his Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 54.

  70. Gillian Tindall, City of Gold (London: Temple Smith, 1982), 252.

  71. On colonial cities, see Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  72. See, for example, Tindall, City of Gold, 252–53.

  73. Cf. Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, 107.

  74. Edwardes, Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island 3:174.

  75. This description is taken from Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Indian Plague Commission, 1898–99, with Appendices and Summary, v (1902), vol. 82, cmd. 810, app. 3, 446–54. See also Ira Klein, “Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 4 (1986): 725–54.

  76. What follows is taken from Bubonic Plague in Bombay, by A. G. Viegas (Bombay: Tatva-Vivechana Press, 1896).

  77. Bleak House, edited with an introduction and notes by Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 710. Robert Alter suggests that the typhus epidemics in London were very much on Dickens’s mind when he wrote this. Alter, Imagined Cities, 67.

  78. The above is taken from Report of the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97, by P.C.H. Snow (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1897), 5–6.

  79. J. K. Condon, The Bombay Plague, Being a History of the Progress of Plague in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 to June 1899 (Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press, 1900), 130.

  80. The above epigraph is from “Mumbai,” in Maze Vidyapeeth, trans. Mangesh Kulkarni, Jatin Wagle, and Abhay Sardesai (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975), reprinted in Shirin Kudchekar’s “Poetry and the City,” in Bombay, ed. Patel and Thorner, 149.

  81. Daya Pawar, Balute (Bombay: Granthali, 1982), 132, cited and translated in Bhagwat’s “Bombay in Dalit Literature,” 114.

  CHAPTER 3. THE CITY ON THE SEA

  1. See Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 71–113, for a detailed account of the Improvement Trust’s projects.

  2. “Development of Bombay City and the Improvement of Communications in the Island,” Resolution of Government, General Department, no. 3022, June 14, 1909, in Bombay Development Committee, Report of the Bombay Development Committee, 1914 (Bombay: Government Press, 1914), app. A.

  3. Evidence Oral and Documentary Recorded by the Back Bay Enquiry Committee, 1926, pt. 3 (London: HMSO, 1927), 5.

  4. Bombay Development Committee, Report, xiii–xv.

  5. Government of India, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Enquire into the Bombay Back Bay Reclamation Scheme, 1926 (London: HMSO, 1926), 7–8.

  6. “Letters from Lord Lloyd to Halifax,” December 22, 1918, BL, OIOLR, Mss. Eur. B.158.

  7. Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Government of Bombay, 3rd August 1920, 565–66.

  8. Cited in Government of India, Report of the Back Bay Enquiry Committee, 10.

  9. W. R. Davidge, “The Development of Bombay,” Town Planning Review (1924): 273–79.

  10. S. Nihal Singh, Development of Bombay (Bombay: Director of Public Information, 1924), 16–29.

  11. Government of India, Report of the Back Bay Enquiry Committee, 39.

  12. Ibid., 37.

  13. Ibid., 53.

  14. Ibid., 17.

  15. Ibid., 47–48.

  16. Government of Bombay, Second ad Interim Report of the Advisory Committee Dealing with the Back Bay Reclamation Scheme (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1925), 9.

  17. Bombay Legislative Council Debates: Official Report, Tuesday, March 3, 1925 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1925), 546.

  18. Bombay Chronicle, March 17, 1926.

  19. Ibid., March 29, 1926.

  20. Ibid., July 22, 1926.

  21. Ibid., August 4, 1926.

  22. Ibid., August 5, 1926.

  23. Times of India, August 6, 1926.

  24. Bombay Chronicle, August 23, 1926.

  25. Ibid., August 25, 1926.

  26. Ibid., November 6, 1926.

  27.
Ibid., November 13, 1926.

  28. See, for example, ibid., June 14, 1927.

  29. Ibid., January 28, 1928.

  30. Ibid., January 30, 1928.

  31. Harvey-Nariman Libel Case, ed. S. M. Surveyor (Bombay: S. M. Surveyor, 1927–28).

  32. Government of India, Report of the Back Bay Enquiry Committee, 82–83.

  33. Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Cities Within, 268.

  34. Cf. Charlotte Benton and Tim Benton, “The Style and the Age,” in Art Deco, 1910–1939, ed. Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (New York: Bulfinch, 2003), 12–27.

  35. Cf. Jon Alff, “Art Deco: Gateway to Indian Modernism,” Architecture + Design 8, no. 6 (November–December 1991): 58.

  36. Ibid.; see also Amin Jaffer, “Indo-Deco,” in Art Deco, ed. Benton, Benton, and Wood, 383–84.

  37. “The Ideal Home Exhibition,” Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects (JIIA) 4, no. 3 (January 1938): 323.

  38. Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Cities Within, 246–47. See also their lavishly illustrated Bombay Deco (Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2008), 41–45.

  39. “Review of Construction and Materials,” JIIA 1, no. 2 (July 1934): 79.

  40. Editorial, Indian Concrete Journal 9, no. 10 (October 1935): 329.

  41. Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay Deco, 264–99. See also Kamu Iyer, ed., Buildings That Shaped Bombay (Mumbai: KRVI, 2000).

  42. “Back Bay Reclamation Scheme,” Times of India, July 29, 1935; and “Back Bay Reclamation Scheme: Detailed Programme of Development,” Times of India, March 10, 1936.

  43. “New Back Bay Buildings,” Illustrated Weekly of India, January 3, 1936, iv; “Building Boom in Bombay,” Illustrated Weekly of India, February 2, 1936, iii.

  44. “Palm Trees along Marine Drive,” Indian Concrete Journal 12, no. 2 (February 1939): 46.

  45. Alff, “Art Deco,” 59.

  46. Editorial, JIIA 4, no. 3 (January 1938): 116.

  47. What follows is drawn from Jon Alff, “Temples of Light: Bombay’s Art Deco Cinemas and the Birth of the Modern Myth,” in Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997), 250–57; and Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay Deco, 46–81.

  48. “Parsi Business Man’s Experiences: Mr. Cambata in Hollywood and New York,” Illustrated Weekly of India, October 25, 1936.

  49. Louis Bromfield, Night in Bombay (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1939), 94.

  50. Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay Deco, 28–32.

  51. Mustansir Dalvi, “‘Domestic Deco’ Architecture in Bombay: G.B.’s Milieu,” in Buildings That Shaped Bombay, ed. Iyer, 14.

  52. What follows is drawn from Naresh Fernandes’s painstakingly and lovingly etched portrait of jazz in Mumbai in his Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Calcutta: Seagull, forthcoming).

  53. Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Cities Within, 246.

  54. Illustrated Weekly of India, May 3, 1936, vi–vii.

  55. Vikram Doctor and Alikhan, “A Century of Indian Advertising,” Advertising Brief, December 30, 1999, 33–47. What follows is drawn from this article.

  56. Government of India, Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (Madras: Government Press, 1928), 180.

  57. Erik Barnow and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 31–36.

  58. Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–24. See also 11–55 for her analysis of the 1920s stunt films.

  59. What follows is based on Rosie Thomas, “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunt,” in Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 35–69; Dorothee Wenner, Fearless Nadia: The True Story of Bollywood’s Original Stunt Queen (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005); Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema, 56–118; and J.B.H. Wadia, “Those Were the Days” (unpublished autobiography, Bombay, 1980).

  60. Wadia, “I Become a Filmmaker,” in “Those Were the Days.”

  61. Thomas, “Not Quite (Pearl) White,” 51.

  62. Bromfield, Night in Bombay, 8.

  63. Ibid., 129–30.

  64. For example, J. P. Orr, Density of Population in Bombay (Bombay: British India Press, 1914), and A. R. Burnett-Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay (London: P. S. King, 1925).

  65. Burnett-Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay, 22.

  66. Cited in Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Cities Within, 210.

  67. Census of India, 1931, vol. 9, pt. 1 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933), 81.

  68. Ibid., pt. 2, 199.

  69. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition, 165.

  70. Bromfield, Night in Bombay, 51–52.

  71. OIOLR: Govt. of Bombay, Home Department Proceedings, P/11466, “Annual Report on Traffic in Women and Children for the Year 1924,” May 8, 1925.

  72. Bombay Vigilance Association, Report of the Prostitution Committee (Bombay: Bombay Vigilance Association, 1927), 8–10, 31.

  73. Claude Batley, “The Importance of City Planning,” in Bombay Looks Ahead, ed. Clifford Manshardt (Bombay: D. B. Tarporevala Sons, 1934), 39.

  74. Illustrated Weekly of India, February 9, 1936.

  CHAPTER 4. THE COSMOPOLIS AND THE NATION

  1. Bombay Chronicle, October 10, 1947.

  2. For biographical details on Manto, I have used Jagdish Chander Wadhawan’s Manto Naama: The Life of Saadat Hasan Manto (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), 13–30, and Manto’s own stories, which are full of references to his life.

  3. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Mammad Bhai,” in Saadat Hasan Manto: Dastavez, ed. Balraj Menra and Sharad Dutt (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1993), 1:343–54. For an English translation, see “A Question of Honour,” in Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, ed. and trans. Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008), 249–57.

  4. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Naya Qanoon,” in Dastavez 1:241–49. For an English translation, see “New Constitution,” in Bitter Fruit, 206–15.

  5. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Babu Gopinath,” in Dastavez 1:215–28. English translation in Bitter Fruit, 279–90.

  6. Ibid. 1:220.

  7. Ismat Chugtai, “Humlog” [We the People], in her My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits, trans. Tahira Naqvi (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001), 105. The biographical details of her life are taken from “Humlog” and “Ghubar-e-Karavaan” [The Dust of the Caravan], ibid., 111–30.

  8. See Shabana Mahmud, “Angare and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1996): 447–67.

  9. Ismat Chugtai, “Lihaaf” [Quilt], trans. M. Asaduddin, in Women Writing in India, ed. S. Tharu and K. Lalita (New York: Feminist Press, 1993). On Chugtai, see Priyamvada Gopal, “Habitations of Womanhood: Ismat Chugtai’s Secret History of Modernity,” in her Literary Radicalism in India (London: Routledge, 2005), 65–88.

  10. Chugtai, “The ‘Lihaaf’ Trial,” in My Friend, My Enemy, 135.

  11. For an interpretation of the sexual politics of these two and other Manto stories, see Priyamvada Gopal, “Dangerous Bodies: Masculinity, Morality, and Social Transformation in Manto,” in Literary Radicalism, 89–122.

  12. Chugtai, “Mera Dost, Mera Dushman,” in My Friend, My Enemy, 193.

  13. “Chugtai, “‘Lihaaf’ Trial,” 131–47.

  14. For Manto’s account of his relationship with Chugtai, see Manto, “On Ismat,” in Ismat: Her Life, Her Times, ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Sadique (New Delhi: Katha, 2000), 156–72.

  15. Ahmed Ali, “The Progressive Writers’ Movement and Creative Writers in Urdu,” in Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature, ed. Carlo Coppola, South Asian Monograph Series Occasional Paper No. 23, vol. 1 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1974), 36.

  16. See Sajjad Zaheer, “Reminiscences,” in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), ed. Sudhi Pradhan, vol. 1 (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979), 33–46; and Carlo Coppola, “All India Progressive Writers’ Association: T
he European Phase,” in Marxist Influences, ed. Coppola, 1:1–34, for an account of the PWA’s founding efforts in Europe.

  17. Coppola, “All India Progressive Writers’ Association,” 7.

  18. What follows is largely based on Hafeez Malik, “The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan,” Journal of Asian Studies 26, no. 4 (1967): 649–64.

  19. Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, Anthems of Resistance (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2006), 37.

  20. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Taraqqipasand,” in Dastavez 1:287–95; and “To My Readers,” in Bitter Fruit,” 657.

  21. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, I Write as I Feel (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1948), 30.

  22. Ibid., 30–31.

  23. “Indian People’s Theatre Association,” Bulletin No. 1, July 1943, in Marxist Cultural Movement, ed. Pradhan, 1:124–42. On the formation of IPTA, see Nandi Bhatia, “Staging Resistance: Indian People’s Theatre Association,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 432–60.

  24. “Provincial Reports Bombay,” in Marxist Cultural Movements, ed. Pradhan, 1:145.

  25. “Bombay,” ibid., 260.

  26. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 97–98. I have drawn details of Abbas’s biography from this text and from his Bombay, My Bombay: The Love Story of the City (Delhi: Ajanta Books International, 1987).

  27. Balraj Sahni, Balraj Sahni: An Autobiography (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1979), 17. For his biography, I have also relied on Bhisham Sahni, “Balraj, My Brother,” in Balraj Sahni: An Intimate Portrait, ed. P. C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1974), 16–49.

  28. Sahni, Balraj Sahni: An Autobiography, 23–26.

  29. Uma Anand and Ketan Anand, Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film (Mumbai: Himalaya Films—Media Entertainment, 2007), 9–10.

  30. Ibid., 17.

  31. Sahni, Balraj Sahni: An Autobiography, 46–47.

  32. What follows is based on Sahni, Balraj Sahni: An Autobiography, 51–56.

  33. “Diary of Margaret C Godley,” C 827/3, June 29 to July 7, OIOLR: Mss. Eur. C.827.

  34. Raj Thapar, All These Years (New Delhi: Seminar Publications, 1991), 4.