TALE OF TWO CITIES
A NEW COLLECTION OF ESSAYS HELPS US BETTER UNDERSTAND THE FOUNDATIONS OF A BOMBAY THAT WAS
The title of this collection of essays sets up a binary that sits uneasily with the work of the urban historian this book seeks to celebrate. Jim Masselos is much more than a researcher of Bombay’s colonial past. He is also a flâneur of the city’s present, and it is through his wanderings that he was able to delineate both communities and identities in the metropolis.
The outcome of an international conference held at the University of Mumbai in 2017, this book brings together the work of several scholars whose research on the city is well known. These essays foreground lesserknown aspects of the city related to specific communities, the spatial development of the city, notions of power and its mobilisation, both through philanthropy and social control and the specific emergence of nationalism, which coincided with the rise of modernity in Bombay. In doing so, these subjects parallel the career interests of Masselos, who sought to understand the city in the 19th and early 20th centuries through his template of ‘encapsulation and integration’, the appreciation of the nature of urban space and its relationship with group identity.
Jesse S. Palsetia, in exploring the rise to dominance of the Parsis in Bombay, identifies the factors that transformed the city’s cultural landscape—the popularity of newspapers and the theatre, a vibrant municipal government, and greater westernisation and Anglicisation (to which I would add a cosmopolitan mindset). It is this ‘seed period’ that provides context for several of the essays. For instance, many merchant princes were, during this time, elevated to city fathers through their influence and munificence. New information about personalities like the Konkani Muslim philanthropist Mohammad Ali Rogay and the relatively unknown inventor Shankar Abaji Bhisey are particularly interesting, placed in the history of the city. The settling and integration of the ‘Irani’ Parsis in India following the famine in Persia in 1871, brings out the vital backstory to their presence.